ESCAPE ROOM MANCHESTER

If you’ve read my Week In The Life post, you’ll know that I recently went to the Escape Room Manchester.

My friend and I decided that we wanted to go to an escape room at the last minute, so when a spot was available at Escape Room Manchester, we went ahead and took it. We were told we’d been booked on to the most difficult one, oooooh. We were both so excited as we love solving puzzles and were determined to get out of that place alive.

Now, the idea of an escape room reminds me of the show that used to come on CBBC, Trapped. Anyone remember that? Anyway, the general gist of it was that we had one hour to solve the puzzles, make it through three rooms and get out the other side. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Well, that’s what we thought, too.

Now this includes spoilers, so if you’re thinking of going to Manchester Escape Room/haven’t been before, you’d better look away now.

Now for some context. The Escape Room we’d been booked in for was an old doctor’s surgery which was shut down because the doctor illegally tried to do experiments on dead bodies to bring them back to life. Scary stuff, right?

The first room:

The room had a sofa, table, safe, book shelf filled with books and some paintings on the wall. After the rules were explained to us, we asked for a little clue as to where we should start searching and were pointed in the right direction. And then the timer started.

We found the first item and were frantically searching the whole room, looking for clues or anything that could tell us what our next puzzle was going to be. We lifted the painting and found that the door to the next room was under the painting. But it was locked.

We carried on looking around but couldn’t figure out what to do and were getting frustrated. Around 15 minutes ticked by and we couldn’t find another clue, so we clicked the light bulb in the corner of the room which meant that the staff could come inside and give us a clue (we could be given three clues in total). We were given a clue which directed us to the book shelf and the covers of the actual books. Some books had little stickers on them and the colours of the stickers corresponded with the colours somewhere else in that room.

We hurriedly checked out all the books and counted the number of books that had each colour’s sticker on them. That was the code to crack one of the padlocks that locked a box. Wahooooo.

Inside the box were some pieces of paper with squares on them and dots in some of the squares. Another piece of paper with some doctor-y stuff on one side had squares with dots inside them on the back of it. Hmmm. We tried to figure out what the heck they meant but we just couldn’t do it. The time ticked by and we were no closer to getting through to the next room, so we asked for another clue.

A staff member came in and told us that the singular boxes and dots on the papers corresponded with the squares and dots on the back of the doctors notes, and, in turn, they corresponded with something else in the room. After thanking the member of staff countless number of times, we figured out what it was that we had to do and thought we’d figured out the code for the next padlock (this one was to be cracked with letters).

However, even though we thought we had the right code, we just couldn’t open the bleeding padlock. We checked again and again to ensure we had the right code and in the end we figured that it was the right code. The problem was that we weren’t entering it into the padlock correctly, oops. After trying again and again, we eventually did it and inside was…A KEY. The key to the next room to be precise. Yayyyyy. It had only taken us round 30 minutes to actually get to this point, but to be fair, they had said that the first room was the hardest of the three. We stuck the key into the next room and cried tears of joy when it opened (we didn’t, I promise).

The second room:

We had to climb through the hole in the wall and there was a stepladder waiting for us on the other side. This room was a lot darker, so it was a good job the first thing we’d found in the previous room was a torch. However, it was still extremely dark so my friend used the torch on her iPhone.

The second room consisted of a shelf with 8 boxes in it and 3 pieces of paper with notes and pictures all over them above the shelf. But what was the clue?

We checked the boxes but they all said “do not open” on top of them so of course I was like we can’t open them. Lolllll. My friend said we have to open them, so we did. And she was right; of course we had to open them! They all had hands/feet inside them (not real ones, thankfully) covered in blood with toes chopped off. The boxes all had symbols on them, too, but again, we couldn’t figure out what those symbols meant. There was a box with a padlock on it at the side, so we thought the symbols/boxes/body parts may have been connected to the code to open the box. But they weren’t.

I picked up the torch to see, as it was too dark, and the torch showed that there was WRITING ON THE WALL which was only visible with a certain type of light (you know, that invisible writing). It gets better; the writing was 4 of the symbols that had been on the boxes. Yesssssss. We hurriedly grabbed the boxes that corresponded with the symbols on the wall & stuck them on the floor. Inside them was one hand, one foot, one hand and one foot. They were all different colours, too. One was purple, one grey, one green and one orange. We tried entering all sorts of codes in the padlock, but none of them worked, obviously. We only had around 15 minutes left (I think) so we decided to ask for our last clue. We were told that one of the unused clues from the last room would have to be used to figure out what the code would be.

The clue included pictures of animals and underneath them were colours and numbers. There was also something written about mixing species to extend the life of the dominant species. My friend figured out that it meant we’d have to mix the colours on the pieces of paper to make the colours of the items in the boxes. Blue and yellow made green. White and black made grey. Red and yellow made orange. But what made purple? I thought it was orange and blue, so we added up the numbers that were next to the colour’s on the piece of paper and tried to open the padlock. But it was no use – it didn’t open. We double checked that we were right about the colours, but kept questioning what made purple. We thought about it again; it’s orange and blue, right? I was 100% certain that it was orange and blue, but it wasn’t working! We were supposed to Google it to see if we were right but somehow got sidetracked and didn’t bother checking. In the end, my friend just tried all kinds of different numbers in the padlock until one actually worked and opened it up. And thankfully, inside was nothing other than the key to the next room! We only had about 5 minutes left at this point so rushed to unlock the next door. Btw, the next day, I Googled what made purple and I was so shocked to see that it was RED and blue, not orange! How did we not know that?!

The third room:

The third room had a ‘patient’ lying on a bed with a white sheet over them. So there was basically a dead person in the room with us. When we lifted the sheet up, all we saw was this skeleton – I’d dropped his legs on the floor when I lifted the sheet and basically crapped myself. Ooooh, I’m shuddering as I type this.

There was a skeleton in the corner which needed it’s body parts to be put back into place, and all of the body parts had numbers on them, whilst the spaces they needed to go into had symbols on them. We only had five minutes left at this point, so were rushing everything and were determined to make it out within the hour. We picked up the body parts and started stuffing them into the skeleton – we’d both studied Biology, so you’d think we’d know the parts of the human body, wouldn’t you? However, that was a long time ago, so our science knowledge failed us then and there (sorry to our science teachers. It wasn’t you, it was us.)

We tried to figure out what the symbols and numbers could have meant, but there was no clue as to what was going on. So we asked for another clue. We were given a clue (I don’t remember what it was) but we still couldn’t figure it out. We knew that we had to get 4 numbers to crack the code so the door would unlock and let us out, but getting the actual numbers was the problem.

There was a switch of some sort on the wall behind the patient and when my friend pressed it, a FOOT came flying down from the ceiling, right on top of her head. Thankfully, it wasn’t a real foot, can you imagine if it was? The foot is basically what we were looking for, as there were four symbols written underneath it. So we knew that the numbers on the four body parts that fitted into the spaces with the symbols on them were the four numbers we needed to crack the code. We were really manic at this point, with just one or two minutes left, so were both so glad when a lovely staff member came inside and told us not to worry when the alarm went off, as they were giving us a few more minutes because we were really close to ‘escaping’.

We carried on shoving body parts into spaces, going for the trial and error method as that was all we could really do. Even when we thought the parts fitted into the spaces, we didn’t know which way the foot was facing; we didn’t know whether the toes were supposed to be pointing left or right so couldn’t be sure which order the symbols were in. There were so many questions, but not enough time. We asked for another clue, and were given another clue, (I can’t remember what it was but it must have been the space that one of the body parts should have gone into). When we thought we’d cracked the code, we tried entering the code in to unlock the door, but it didn’t work. We carried on trying and carried on entering codes until our time was up.

So we got a couple of extra clues and just a few more minutes in the end because we were soo close to cracking the final code, so with all those extras, you’d think we’d have managed to escape, wouldn’t you?

Sadly, that wasn’t the case. We didn’t manage to do it, although we were really, really close. So I’m writing this up from the Escape Room right now. If you have any tips on how I can get out, please do let me know – the dead body decides to stretch from time to time and it’s a little unnerving.

And that’s my review of The Escape Room Manchester! Would I recommend it?

I definitely would, it was amazing!

Have you ever been to an Escape Room? How was it? Or more importantly, did you manage to escape?

I’d definitely recommend going, it was so much fun! It’s a really fun thing to do as it gets everyone working together & you all become so motivated to get our before the time is over! Thank you for reading xxx